


Tua Maxima Culpa

by Coldest_Fire



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Angelus as a 2-episode big bad, Angelus is at his worst, Coming out as a slayer, Dru has PTSD, Drusilla is Not Okay, Drusilla's backstory is a lot. there will be more detailed warnings on chapters, Everything is the same but they're in Uni, F/M, Flashbacks to when Dru was Sired, Give Dru Her Own Arc 2k20, Gratuitous John Milton (paradise lost), Implied/Referenced Mass Murder, Implied/Referenced Minor Character Death, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Major character death is JUST angelus getting staked, No other characters are killed, Poor Dru, Religious Imagery (it's a vampire series and Dru was a Nun once), Season 2 AU, Spike is love's bitch, University AU, flashbacks are skippable and in chapter 6
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:01:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28000584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coldest_Fire/pseuds/Coldest_Fire
Summary: Angelus arrives in Sunnydale, and Spike and Dru have to team up with Buffy, Willow, Xander and Giles to get out alive. He has a vendetta, and they've just turned this into the most interesting game he could have hoped for. Buffy has to face a vampire bent on destroying--and likely siring her. Dru has to face her sire. Spike has promised, whatever happens, Angelus isn't getting to Dru this time.“I want asylum,” Spike announced, his arms protectively curled around Drusilla. “You’re in more danger than I could ever…” he lost his words for a moment, letting Dru down to stand on her own legs. She stayed flattened protectively against his chest. “Slayer,” he plead, “what’s just come into Sunnydale is going to leave a lot more damage in his wake than any vampire you've seen before. You’re going to have a bloody mess on your hands, and I want him dead as much as you do.”
Relationships: Angelus/Drusilla (BtVS), But like very bad and in flashbacks only, Daniel "Oz" Osbourne/Willow Rosenberg, Drusilla/Spike (BtVS), Jenny Calendar/Rupert Giles, Spike/Drusilla
Comments: 5
Kudos: 25





	1. Never Again

**Author's Note:**

> So this is the prologue, and after is I guess, in an episode, when the theme song would play, so...
> 
> I'm going to preface with my characters do deviate from Canon a bit. Dru in canon has a bit of a Stockholm-syndrome type dynamic with Angelus. What he did to her worked--she can't and in fact won't fight back or try to resist anymore. And I just... with everything I know about her backstory, that doesn't sit 100%, so you will notice my Dru is a little off, and that's by design. 
> 
> Additionally, as a psych major, writing "Joss Whedon Crazy" is strange for me to write. I don't have nearly the AbPsych background to diagnose her, but I do ascribe part of why she talks the way she does to the fact that she's already dealing with being in the future and the present, and now, she has flashbacks, and spent a while without much tethering her to the present--if my present was with angelus, I also would escape into the past and future. There's definitely PTSD involved with the flashbacks, but I can't really speculate much beyond that. If anyone wants to talk Psych and Dru though, I'm here for it. 
> 
> This chapter is brought to you by me listening to "To Be Alone" by Hozier.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Spike and Dru are trying to have a romantic night in, and instead, Dru has a vision.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is the prologue, and after is I guess, in an episode, when the theme song would play, so...
> 
> I'm going to preface with my characters do deviate from Canon a bit. Dru in canon has a bit of a Stockholm-syndrome type dynamic with Angelus. What he did to her worked--she can't and in fact won't fight back or try to resist anymore. And I just... with everything I know about her backstory, that doesn't sit 100%, so you will notice my Dru is a little off, and that's by design. 
> 
> Additionally, as a psych major, writing "Joss Whedon Crazy" is strange for me to write. I don't have nearly the AbPsych background to diagnose her, but I do ascribe part of why she talks the way she does to the fact that she's already dealing with being in the future and the present, and now, she has flashbacks, and spent a while without much tethering her to the present--if my present was with angelus, I also would escape into the past and future. There's definitely PTSD involved with the flashbacks, but I can't really speculate much beyond that. If anyone wants to talk Psych and Dru though, I'm here for it. 
> 
> This chapter is brought to you by me listening to "To Be Alone" by Hozier.

Spike set one final doll into place in Dru’s collection, after sitting them all down together and gagging, blindfolding and binding them as Dru asked. The final doll, Cynthia, he was pretty sure had been bound in ribbons so long that the skin under the bindings would be a different shade that the rest of her yellowed porcelain “This where you want them, love?” He asked.

Dru smiled, her hand skating down one glassy-eyed face, closing her little eyelids. She was the only one who could close her eyes, and Dru liked her best. “Yes, Miss Edith gets so sad if she can’t taste the stars in the wind,” she replied, removing her hand and allowing the doll’s eyes to open again. She took a couple steps forward, so close Spike dreamed he could feel the heat of her body, even though they were both long dead. Wordlessly, she slid her arms around his waist, swaying to a tune only she heard.

He closed his eyes, putting his hands on her shoulders, and swaying with her. This dark, dank abandoned factory was as good as home for now. When she began to hum, he smiled, pressing a delicate kiss to the side of her neck. He was always careful with that side. Sometimes it was too close. She didn’t cringe away from him, which filled his chest with something almost like breath. She'd killed him more than a century ago, but she also kept him alive. He was more alive than he'd been as William. 

With his eyes closed, he could imagine they were anywhere, but the place wasn’t so bad with his eyes open. The abandoned factory was all rusted metal walls, and arched beams that gained their arch when something tunnelled under Sunnyhell and made the building sink halfway into the ground. He was going to cover them all in candles soon. Make it more their home than just the first empty building with a door they could chain. Maybe some carpets as well for the floor, which right now was covered in years of dust and grime. The bed was nice. They’d salvaged it out of a moving van, after the driver had what he was certain would be labelled an unfortunate accident. It had a nice wrought iron frame that Dru had already laced a set of manacles though. Right now it was rough, but with enough candles, he thought it could be _theirs._ Candles always took him back to their stolen nights together while they still travelled with her sire.

Like those nights, they danced, and he rested his head on her shoulder to bask in the feeling of being alone with her. Once they returned to bed, he’d have poetry to show her, so she could decide if any more of his supposed peers needed to be stopped. She had a way of sifting through them, and a particular distaste to those who though Donne's Elegy to his mistress was aspirational. One person had unironically riffed off his "I am colonizing this woman like America" metaphor, which, he _really_ hoped that didn't fly in the 1600's, but it sure didn't when Spike was crashing that Lit class, and he heard it.

_To think he could ever be entitled to his muse was a poet’s greatest sin_ , Dru had told him; his words nearly a century ago _._ When Dru deemed other undergrads noxious, he stopped them. A fitting reminder to the rest, and a decent meal. Besides, going to those classes was the only time anyone but Dru had appreciated his poetry.

It was only fitting he share his own work as well—a riff off of Shakespeare’s sonnet 130. His lips against her neck he whispered, “My lover’s eyes have long since held the sun,/The stars about her head became the light/ her heart-”

He was barely got two words into the next line when she collapsed. He tried to catch her, but the fall was violent and instantaneous. Rather than dropping, she threw herself to the floor, curling her body in on itself, trembling hands fisted in the hem of her dress, her vampiric nails tearing the fabric in places. She tucked her head into her knees so tightly he could see the muscles in her neck straining through a thick curtain of her dark hair. She was under attack, wherever she'd gone. She whimpered as he got down on the ground beside her, whole body shuddering. Spike hadn’t seen her like this in years.

“Love?” he asked, knowing better than to touch her without knowing where she was. “Drusilla, you aren’t there. Follow my voice,” he plead, keeping his voice soft, despite the edge of panic that crept in. He had almost no ability to get through to her during her visions, and even less when it was the past that claimed her. He could do nothing but wait for her to return, but he was used to it. They'd gotten less frequent when they left her sire--at least then it was usually the future and not the past.

He sat on the dusty floor beside her, talking to her as he always had—for minutes or hours, the time feeling longer than it should for people who’d live forever. He stopped when she slackened, going from tense to limp, like when they drained a human past their ability to fight back. Concern colouring his voice, he asked her, “are you here with me, pet?”

He didn’t get words as a response, but a whimper and what _could_ have been his name. Taking it as a sign that at least she knew who he was, he picked her up. Her body was limp like one of her dolls, and held her against his chest, where his heart would beat if it hadn’t stilled more than a century ago. Slowly, as she seemed to relearn how to move, her arms started to rise, shakily and in small, jerky movements, as though she was afraid to touch him. "It's okay, love," he breathed, "it's me." Slowly, she steadied herself against his waist. Without looking up at him, she slowly brought her legs together, her muscles clenching to hold them tightly together. “Dru,” he breathed, his skin prickling, and throat constricting. He'd learned what this meant a century ago.

Back when Angelus was with them, she hadn’t known how to tell Spike what she wanted, or when she wanted it. He’d listened to her reactions, until she was ready to tell him. She went that tense only when Angelus had been involved, either in her memories, or not. 

“He’s back,” she whimpered, barely able to speak the words into existence.

Spike stifled a growl, his arms wrapped tightly around her as Dru tucked herself inside his coat. “He won’t come near you, love, I promise,” his voice broke, and he continued in a whisper, “never again.”


	2. Bad Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Buffy meets Angelus in the cemetery, and they team up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to chapter 2. This chapter brought to you by me jamming to Cold Blooded by The Pretty Reckless. Dunno why my notes are now my playlist. We have gone 1 whole chapter, by the end of this, without me slipping in English major references to poetry and/or fiction I've covered.

Buffy kind of wished tonight wasn’t Kendra’s day off, if only because Spike and his weird girlfriend had recently taken to playing _murder chess_ , or something, and it wasn’t a fair game if one of them saw the future. She wondered when exactly they’d upgraded from a pain in the ass with pretentious poetry, and his certifiably wacky girlfriend to an actual threat. Maybe about the time he started leaving bodies in supply closets with poems covered in edits and critique stapled to their bodies post mortem.

_Even better_ was the fact that the news had picked up on it and was calling him _the Sonnet Killer_. They were up to five victims—and there was a pattern, all guys, all weird, vaguely icky poems about girls found on the bodies. The authorities thought he was doing this to get back at a girlfriend, but it was worse, knowing he was instead trying to entertain one. Worse, her mom still thought it was fine to invite him in for hot chocolate, and Buffy couldn’t just tell her or she’d get majorly wiggy. She was _not_ telling her about the whole slayer thing just so she could get Spike out of her house. She'd have to stake him. 

So here she was, new boots already coated in grave muck, searching every cemetery in Sunnydale for them. She knew she should have killed him while he was doing his pompous little guest lecture, witnesses be damned.

The cemetery was dark, and kind of eerie, the kind of still and silent that came before the crack of thunder in a storm. It was a charged silence, and though she’d already slain three vamps—none relevant, unfortunately—she felt this weird itch, that there was something _more_ here. Something worse.

She spotted it behind a gravestone. One of your garden-variety _interview with a vampire_ wannabes, complete with the billowing coat, and the solemn, brooding expression on his face. One of those weird vampires that probably thought being a parasite that sustained itself by draining other people’s lives was some bizarro kind of romantic. _Ugh_. She wouldn’t normally think twice before engaging—the weird ones were usually easy enough to kill—the moves they learn from their movies were _terrible_ fighting strategy. Something about this guy was wrong, and it wasn’t just the lame act.

She’d gotten this feeling before when she had to deal with the Master and she’d ended up dead. Maybe this time if she wasn’t careful, she wouldn’t make it back. Buffy crouched behind a headstone, cursing her choice to wear a light blue sweater. She didn’t camouflage with anything in this getup. Didn’t think she’d need to, because Spike would see her coming with his unfair psychic girlfriend cheating.

Peering around the side, the vampire had turned to face the headstone, squinting. Buffy had an irrational sense that she was just where he wanted her. “Personally,” he drawled, “I’ve never known slayers to be the cowering type.”

It was a bad idea to fall for that line. She didn’t have much for options. She was deep in the cemetery, and hadn’t brought backup. Running was out of the question, and there was nowhere to hide to wait him out and hours until dawn. Waiting for him to catch up was out of the question. That left catching him by surprise. She dropped into a crouch and waited until he was within range, launching herself at him from the side of the gravestone.

“How’s this for a slayer?” she quipped, as she brought him to the ground, her body landing on his knees—hopefully breaking one of them.

He sat up rapidly, destabilizing her, and using his legs to flip them over and pin her. “Honestly?” he asked, “exactly what I was hoping for, but thanks for playing.”

Buffy brought one knee up, slamming it into his groin and shoving him off her so she could get to her feet. The pained hiss that escaped his lips meant she had some time. She shoved him onto his back and pressed the tip of her stake against his sternum. “Talk. Did Spike send you to slow me down?”

His expression changed when she said _Spike_. He went from a snarling vampire to his human face without the bumpies, nonplussed for a second before something in his eyes lit up. “Why would Spike send me?” He demanded, “you’re basically his pet slayer now. I mean, you’re letting he and Drusilla run around Sunnydale like they own the place.”

Buffy shot back, “so what, you’ve come to Sunnydale to grade me on my slaying? Just when I thought the watcher’s council couldn’t get more annoying.” Something about what he’d said was already under her skin. She was trying to get Spike out of Sunnydale, it was just that he could see her coming and that was making him a pain in the ass.

He laughed until it grated in her enough that she pressed the stake into him just a little more insistently. “Hey, I get it. It doesn’t look good for a rookie if you just let me go, so I’ll give you an option. You can stake me right here, and get a gold star from your little watcher for killing the _big bad evil vampire_ , or you can solve your little Spike problem.”

Buffy glared down at him, not moving off of him. “What do you know about Spike?”

“Well, for starters,” he drew the words out, very at ease for a man with a stake against his chest, “I know his blindspots. _She_ created this monster, and I know just how to give her back what she deserves so she won’t see us coming.” He sounded cocky, and Buffy had never heard of a vampire that wasn’t big into the whole being a monster thing, so she knew there was more to it.It was just the only lead she had, and it would be easier to track down monster-boy for a date with Mr Pointy than Spike.

“Great. So what is it you want in return?” She was way too smart to not expect him to want something. Vampires were not altruistic.

He smiled, the expression oozing across his face. “All I want is to live. He’s yours. I’ll take care of his girl too, make sure she pays for what she started.” He sounded like he was telling some kind of joke that she wasn’t in on, but she took a guess that it was some unfinished business.

“Can vampires have bad blood?” She remarked, and he groaned before his face regained that almost pompously solemn expression.

“Drusilla… she found me when I was human. Trying to do right by all the people I’d hurt.Had a sister, and a father, two brothers that I didn’t want to turn out anything like me. It all started when my mum disappeared,” a hint of an accent came out when his voice got almost wistful. “those were the last good days. Some girl, this beautiful, helpless looking girl took her away from me in front of my eyes. Never saw her face. I thought she was the fey, or something.”

“It changed me, slayer, and I tried so hard to change back. Fight the good fight, help the helpless, and damn, she was the shadow out of the corner of my eyes. The thing you see when you’re barely awake. Gave her a chance, once, and she walked into my house, and she killed them. All of them. My sister last, while I was holding her hand, telling her she’d be okay,” he trailed off, and closed his eyes, turning away from Buffy as best he could. She eased up, and took the stake away from his chest. 

He continued, a baleful look in his dark eyes, “she didn’t take me, but she followed me. Whispered things, about how I’d done it. _I_ caused it. I was damned, and she was the face of my accuser. I begged the local convent to take me, and when they sent me away, I heard they were all dead, weeks later. I ran as far as I could get, took myself to the ends of the earth as far as I knew them. Everywhere I turned she was there. Everyone who took me in paid for it, until I was about to—well, there was only one way to stop it. That’s when she turned me into this. Plucked me out of the ocean, killed me instead. When I rose, I was a monster.”

Buffy looked away this time, long enough to miss a momentary smirk. “I just want her to regret it, for a moment, really.”

Buffy responded, barely able to muster a voice. “She will. She might have gotten away with it back then that’s over now. She’s never going to kill anyone again, once we find her.” She offered her hand to him, helping him up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, he plagiarizes Dru's backstory, and no, he does not have a soul at the moment. And yes, he thinks she started this, by thinking she could get away, and earlier, by existing as a pretty religious girl with prophetic visions in 1860 and catching his eye.


	3. I’ve Got A Theory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Willow, Xander and Giles settle in for a night of research when Buffy and Angel(us) arrive to start up the plot to capture their little serial killer. Giles senses something is wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! So I have a lot more written, but no motivation, so as I edit it, I’m just going to post here, and hope other people reading means I finish it. 
> 
> Setting the first three seasons of Buffy in a university is something I’d always wanted. It made sense: Buffy and co could skip class at will, loiter wherever they wanted, and get away with so much weirdness, because campus is Like That. Also, makes dating vamps who died in their twenties less weird. Also if Angel wasn’t a single episode villain in this project, it would make the “Buffy sleeps with him and he loses his soul” less dubious if she wasn’t 17. Also, I want Giles to have the funding/resources that a tenured prof would. Also my GF is a religion major, and I’m an English major, so this particular scene is just her life if her department was big.

In the UC Sunnydale Department of Religious and Mythological Studies Library, Giles had just started on his third cup of tea while he waited for his slayer to return. He paced his office, wondering what was taking her, having to be mindful that he didn’t trip over a pile of ancient, valuable and easy to ruin books haphazardly stacked on the floor. His cup, which read “kiss the Librarian”, and had been a gift from Willow and Xander one year was perched on a coaster with an abstract symbol that was supposed to represent the power of the slayer, but mostly looked like a firework. The watcher’s council gave it to him, and he couldn’t throw it out until Travers did something particularly unpardonable and he lit it on fire on a video call.

The shelves behindhis desk were where the more valuable books went, or anything anyone might steal to prevent him from stopping another demon, and there were crosses mounted on the shelf that had to be removed to pull anything out. To the left was Buffy’s weapons rack, in what appeared to be a coat closet, again with crosses as knobs to open the doors. He figured that was best not left out for the students to see. One of them saw a crossbow on his desk once, and that was enough of a departmental debacle, which should have ended in him leaving the dean in a cemetery overnight, and then sending Buffy to slay him, because oh no, now he was a vampire.

He was quite certain the students thought all the crosses meant their mythology prof was secretly deeply catholic, or just very paranoid. They were half-right. It always drove him crazy when Buffy was out for so long on routine missions.

He forced himself to sit down, clearing three books off his chair and onto the floor beside him, telling himself she’d probably stopped for frozen yoghurt or something. Absently, he leafed though one of the books on his desk, where he had a rather condescending guide to ancient Sumerian and a tome that was likely detailing some form of snake-related apocalypse, or else it was about someone’s frustrations with their garden—the metaphor was sufficiently vague that he thought it might make an excellent next article if it was garden, and a very difficult week if not.

He wondered if perhaps, he should cross-reference with some of one of the older watcher diaries. Everett Mason, who spent his time investigating an “ascendant” demon he claimed would be devastating. Had the diaries been closer, he would have, except that they were in the main library, locked in what some of his grad students called naughty thesis prison. It was just a series of locked shelves with transparent glass doors, that had inlaid crosses, in case a vampire wanted to try taking those. If he entered the main library, he risked having to acknowledge that Xander was eating at the table again.From the table in the middle of his library, he heard a voice call out “Giles, Xander is going out for more doughnuts, do you want anything?”

“Perhaps for Xander to make it through a whole page of the book I gave him identifying last week’s subtype of Fyarl demons,” he requested, taking a sip of his tea. “Though, if you mean doughnuts, perhaps a chocolate dip will ease the taste of disappointment.”

He heard Willow giggle, and Xander yell back “hey! I identified them. They’re the dead kind now, and they’re kinda slimy.”

Resisting the urge to put his head in his hands, Giles resumed his Sumerian translation, “and through the weeds they—” that verb meant something like crawl on their bellies, but it was used in a diminutive form, usually used for worms. That lead him to believe it was a tale about snakes occupying someone’s garden, but he couldn’t be sure until he pieced together the next few lines. He made it a few more sentences until Willow called to him again, “Hey Giles, I think you should come see this!”

He supposed return was inevitable, but if he saw crumbs, he swore, he was going to end Xander. When he left his office through the side door, it let him into the main library, where he faced the main table, and the railing of the second raised floor.The front was full of lockup cases, and then glass cases of artefacts. Up on the platform were the less fragile books, and the one window, which three years ago, the grad students painted up like a stained glass church window, with Giles as Jesus, and the caption below him reading, “I can reshelve your books, but not your sins.” The shelves were arranged tightly together, the aisles claustrophobic from the sheer volume of literature (as if he’d ever let the campus library store any of his books).

Willow was at the main table in front of everything, as surrounded as he was by books, but so much shorter she disappeared into them. There was no one at the “timeout table” the grad students called the table by the door where food was permitted, but Xander had left an empty doughnut box in his wake.

When Willow spied him through the veritable fortress of books she’d amassed, she told him about her research. “I was reading up on psychic stuff because of the whole Drusilla thing, and at first I thought it was a spell, right. I mean a vampire witch, that would be pretty spooky, right?” she asked, a proud little smile on her face telling Giles she’d found something relevant.

He couldn’t help but be proud of Willow. Two more years until he would personally duel the dean of the department if he didn’t let him take her on as one of his grad students. He had to remind himself that it was morally wrong to leave him in that cemetery overnight. “But she isn’t a witch?” he asked.

Willow’s grin grew as she shook her head, “Nope, if she was she’d be all burned out all the time because of all the seeing things. So I was reading this thing here,” she pulled out one of the more recent books, a Victorian guide to magic usable by humans, “and then I found it again over here,” in a book from the late reformation, in the 1600’s. “And both of them talk about involuntary magic and stuff like birthrights and curses. And no one gets a curse that cool without some serious drawbacks.”

“So you think the same curse that gives her the visions drives her insane?” Giles guessed, “sort of a variant of Cassandra’s curse?”

Willow clapped, “That’s one of two of my theories. The curse theory says she probably ate someone important or something, and a witch went, ‘how’d you like a taste of crazy-juice’ and then boom! Vision powers.” She clapped to punctuate it, and then smiled up at Giles as though she expected an A or a gold star, or a cookie, and Giles could readily have given her any of them.

“And your other theory?” he asked.

“Oh! That one’s also cool, but a little less provable. See, especially in the early modern wackiness, they talk a bunch about people being born with, uh, well it calls them the devil’s gifts, but basically they’re just magic abilities. And sometimes they’re just what happens when you’re a girl and you can do math. Anyway, she could have been born with it, and then the whole, probably going to hell thing could have…” she flipped through the victorian book until she landed on a page with an eye drawn at the top, “lead to the victorians being like ‘hey, thats a weird kinda pervert’ cause they were also all with the blaming, and then maybe she was like ‘fine, I’m gonna eat you all anyway’ when she got all vampy, and the whole side effect of not making sense is kinda just what happens to you when sometimes you’re in the future?”

Giles smiled, “excellent! If you could make some notes on what she’d be able to see and where her blind spots are with either of the two, we could start to narrow it down by testing what she and Spike are able to react to.” He also thought a paper on it would make a particularly satisfying honours project, but stopping the Sonnet killer came first.

Willow was starting to jot things down from the victorian book while Giles unlocked the watcher diaries, and started his search for the watcher who first referenced Drusilla. There was silence once more in the library, until Xander’s voice cut through it from the door, “Hey, Giles, they were out of chocolate dip, so I brought you a jelly doughnut like all the rest of us.”

He returned to the table, and opened the box, offering one to Willow, who scarfed down hers, and then wiped her fingers on her jeans to get the icing sugar off.

Giles re-locked thesis prison and carried his stack of journals to the table, setting them across from Willow so he could select a doughnut. He was about to voice his disapproval of any doughnut that oozed a dubiously chemical slime into his mouth when the door slammed open, and in walked Buffy, with a strange man in tow. The two of them waited just within the entrance to the library, near the food-table.

Giles closed his watcher’s journal, and drew himself up to his full height. “Uh, Hello, I’m Dr Rupert Giles, and this is the UC Sunnydale Department of- oh, sod the title, this is my library. I’m terribly sorry, but we’re closed right now, except to my grad students.” He wished Xander had a modicum of dignity right now, rather than staring at the stranger with a mouthful of half-eaten doughnut about to exit his mouth from his vantage point beside Willow. He supposed this was more accurate to grad students by early May anyway.

“It’s okay Giles, he’s in on the slayer gig,” Buffy reassured him, hoping her watcher wasn’t too annoyed. She knew how weird he got when she let people in on it. At the start he wasn’t even wild about Willow and Xander until they started with the research, and he decided Willow was his new favourite bachelor’s student.

“Oh good,” Giles replied absently, before his brain caught up with his mouth, “Who is he, and why does he know about- about that? Buffy, I understand that it can be hard feeling isolated but we can’t go telling every guy that you go for coffee with and-” the poor watcher was so flustered he could hardly string words together at the prospect of taking on another civilian.

“Vampire,” Buffy interjected.

“Vampire,” Giles repeated absently, “vampire?” He fumbled for his cross, sincerely hoping this was his duties as a watcher driving him to either nightmares or strokes, because the alternative was that his daughter—his slayer had invited a vampire into his library. 

“He’s here to help with Sonnet Guy,” Buffy explained, “he knows a bunch about Dru, and he wants her gone, so I though maybe we could help each other out?” She could already see the look in Giles’ eyes as he took his glasses off to clean them. There was a vein in his temple that appeared to be trying to exit his body. Something told her he was going to need a lot more to go on if he was ever going to let her off for this one.“She kinda turned him into a monster and all and-” she started to explain.

The vampire told her not to tell her watcher everything he’d confided in her, at the same time as Xander blurted, entirely too loudly, “a monster! Which is currently in our library! Shouldn’t this be consecrated ground or something? Giles, why don’t you make with the consecration?” It couldn’t be too hard, unless they needed to call up a priest or something, and the priest didn’t feel like making with the holy into the room full of demon texts. Or else maybe the demon texts would catch fire.

All eyes fell on Xander after his outburst, until Giles put his glasses back on and gave the vampire his best disappointed professor glare. Maybe his story had charmed Buffy, but Giles was a man of logic, research, and consternation where vampires were concerned. And he’d start with looking him up in the watcher diaries. “Does he have a name?” he asked Buffy, fingers curled so tight around the cross that his knuckles turned white. He wouldn’t talk to the vampire just yet.

“Liam,” the vampire responded, with no sign of hesitation. A generic name, Giles noted. The last undergrad lecture he’d been saddled with, he’d taught several Liams. Not one that would be easy to look up, but it gave him a starting point. Assuming, of course, he could be trusted to provide a name.

“And just what precisely do you want from my slayer, Liam?” he asked, in the same tone he’d have used if she were his daughter and he caught them alone in her room. Buffy was his daughter in every way that counted, and he would protect her.

“I just need her help, Doc. The Sonnet Killer’s name is Spike, and his girl hurt me. I need to make sure she can’t do it again,” he offered. Giles didn’t look at the eyes, or even really at him, but again noted the lack of information. A vampire as old as Drusilla could have hurt hundreds, if not thousands of people. Much like his students’ long answer questions when they didn’t study, he danced around including any verifiable facts. Those students rarely passed.

“If you want any chance at collaborating with my slayer, you will wait in the hallway while I speak with her privately,” he said coldly, the vein in his temple still pulsing. He folded his arms, not so imposing in his tweed, but he was resolute. More importantly, he had his cross.

Liam grudgingly left the room. Still not taking off her jacket or coming further into the library, Buffy made a noise of indignation, interrupted only by the click of the door. 


	4. Nun of Our Concerns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Giles makes with the research, and Liam is identified as Angelus--and for plagiarism. That's Not his backstory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! long time no write! I've got about 2 more very unedited not great chapters that I can get ready before I have to start writing my own content. Chapter is dedicated to my friend Mickyl who I persuaded to watch Buffy! Hope you have fun with this fic too (and hopefully there's less me having to write poetry than Fire and Powder)

Once they were alone, Giles stared at Buffy, making that little sound in the back of his throat that he made in lieu of a more dramatic gesture, like screaming out the window. The worst thing he could do now was come down hard, because then she’d get angry and endanger herself behind his back. He just needed to compose himself. It was a little hard to find a dignified way to ask her what in the bloody hell she was thinking or if she'd sustained a blow to the brain that had left her common sense in the grass at a cemetery. “I do hope you have a good reason to be letting vampires into my library,” he finally said.

“I wouldn’t have if we had any other leads on Spike and Dru,” Buffy insisted, not noticing Willow trying to speak when she added, “and he has a history with Drusilla. He knows she’s all bad news-y better than any of us, because she turned him into a vampire in the first place.” She knew how irrational she looked to him, and she swore, this wasn’t really as crazy as it probably seemed. She had better judgement than he knew. _And_ she was the one on the hook to deal with Spike before the council god mad about there being a high profile vamp she hadn't taken out.

_Finally, some objective information._ Giles seized the stack of diaries he’d brought out to look for Drusilla, starting to leaf through one of the newer ones. “Did she create him before or after Spike?” he asked, looking for anything between 1859 and the early 1900’s. The watcher from 59’ to 63’ wrote everything like he was an aspiring biographer, but was remarkably detailed, so if he was from that range, Giles would find it somewhere amid all his melodrama. 

He hadn’t said anything about Spike, so Buffy made a guess, “before, probably. Spike would totally have been all weird if his girlfriend was stalking another guy,” she suggested. “Or else he’d have been into it. Either way, Liam didn’t mention him at all, except as the _Sonnet Annoyance,”_ she wracked her brain for any mention of Spike being involved. Maybe he was, because Dru really didn’t seem coherent enough to pull off a plan like that, unless she was using her visions. Still, if she couldn't string together words that made sense, could she plan like that? Buffy wasn’t sure what she was capable of anymore after trying to catch the pair of them. Pre-Spike meant Giles could throw out anything after 1881, which was the first reference to a vampire who killed with railroad spikes. That gave him a narrower window.

“Stalking?” Giles asked, “did she do anything that would have drawn a lot of attention? Anything a watcher might have attributed to her?” He pressed. The answer was beginning to take shape, and he would be fact-checking Liam’s every word through Buffy, if he wasn’t going to tell Giles himself. He'd done a fair bit of research for his PhD. Liam couldn't hide from him in these books.

“God, If I’d known you’d ask this many questions, I’d have studied,” Buffy quipped, and then shook her head and perched on the table. “Well, it started with his family, which, who knows if that made it back to the kingdom of tweed, but she got really, really carried away. Like when she killed a convent he ran to,” Buffy recalled. 

“Monastery,” Willow interrupted her without looking up from her notes, “you mean monastery. He’d never have been allowed into a convent. They didn't let men in.” She had to make sure the facts were accurate to research, even if she trusted Buffy’s instincts. Odds were good this was a weird misunderstanding, hopefully. Liam hadn't seemed too homicidal when they met? 

“He _said_... never mind,” Buffy could already sense Giles picking apart the story, “Maybe there were no monks nearby in wherever? Also then everyone else he stayed with ended up dead, so there should be a major trail of bodies to look for. And an ocean. He mentioned an ocean,” she tried to make up for that one bit of info that was weird. Liam hadn’t exactly told her a huge amount, and she couldn't really blame him for not wanting to talk about it. That was the first time she'd ever seen a vampire have emotions like that.

Willow grabbed the stack of journals from Giles, and started to pick out the landlocked slayers she could recall, passing him back the stack, “I mean, maybe they were weird nuns, or he was like, sleeping in a church basement that was close to the convent or something, and it was technically the priest or something, but the nuns died too, because, I guess she's not a fan of the church?” Willow tried, “but the rest should be easy to find, right Giles?” She asked. It still seemed weird to her that a vampire had been intent enough on wrecking this guy's life that she went into a building full of burning things. What had Liam done that made her decide to do that? What was _up_ with Drusilla? Was it a future thing? Or a revenge against the church thing? 

“Yes, yes,” Giles responded absently, leafing through the journals with the haunting feeling in the back of his head that he’d seen nuns in one of them. Maybe he’d have to relent to Jenny's desire to create that database, so they could search _nun_. Admittedly, it was times like these that would be handy.

“And I mean, maybe he didn’t know and the nuns went all Gandalf?” Willow suggested. When Xander, Giles and Buffy looked at her bewildered, she filled in _“you shall not pass?”_ Before getting back to the point, “What I mean is, I’m sure people would get stuff wrong about things today if you asked them in 200 years or so, right? It doesn’t have to mean he’s lying?” She sounded doubtful.

Xander wasn’t so sure either. “I don’t know, Will, I think innocent until proven guilty is for people with pulses,” he suggested, still defensive. He _hated_ seeing guys with Buffy. Or any guy that wasn’t either old like Giles, or gay like Andrew, or related to her, if her dad ever visited, but he was also old, probably. That was a lot of guys. She shouldn’t need more guys than that, he decided. The rest were probably a bad call.

Buffy rolled her eyes. “Calm down, Xander, I’m not letting him into mom’s house or anything like that. We’re working together, once Giles finishes his background check, or before that, if he’s _taking too long,_ and we have a _serial killer to apprehend_.” She said, tapping an imaginary watch on her wrist at him.

He started at the start, with the 1859 slayer, Anne, who was British, but had spent some time in France as well. Her watcher was the biographer, and other than painting a striking picture of her, he’d detailed quite a few memorable vampires. 1860, London Convent Massacre. Ascribed to a vampire with to quote "A face like an angel." It was a terribly bloody sight. The weather theorized the vampire in question had 2-5 uncredited accomplices. Skimming down the page, he saw Drusilla's name. “Does Drusilla look particularly angelic?” he asked the group as he leafed through to get to the section for an illustration. He didn't have time to deal with his messy handwriting--he needed something _fast_. 

Buffy shrugged, “I didn't get a good look at her, she just called Spike off, and then he ran off with her. Plus, undead means not quite my type,” she replied, “why, did you find it?” She asked, leaping off the table to take a look for herself. Before she made it more than three steps, the door slammed open, and in Liam walked, a flurry of motion and energy. It was like he was vibrating.

“We don’t have time for this, Slayer,” he insisted, “Spike is going to get away from us. The trick with Drusilla is to move quickly, so she doesn’t have time to see it. If we’re going to act, we have to _go_.” His voice was terse, and each step he took toward Buffy possessed a kind of urgency. He wanted to _go_. 

“Buffy’s not going anywhere with you, are you Buffy?” Xander insisted, and Willow looked helplessly between Liam and Giles, waiting for someone to tell her what was going on, or just give her the book and let her research while Liam, Buffy and Giles talked whatever out.

Giles was trying to read faster. London Church massacres. Entire convent murdered violently, blood smeared up the walls, first time anyone saw the vampire, Drusilla, who was thought to have been a member of this convent. Another more major vampire's involvement was speculated, though not confirmed. Finally, the other Perpetrator was identified in vague sketch Anne herself had made from a glimpse she caught of two vampires travelling, one identified as Drusilla. Half a face, shadowy and indistinct, but somehow a dead-ringer for the man who was now directly behind Buffy.

“Angelus,” Giles read, the book thrown to the table, as he grabbed his holy water, and rushed toward his daughter.

Everything moved too fast. Liam— _Angelus’_ face shifted, and he tried to get an arm around Buffy. Giles threw the vial of holy water, and Buffy’s reflexes kicked in fast enough to take a swing at the approaching vampire. Her punch landed squarely against his cheekbone, and pushed him into the path of the holy water she hadn’t seen coming. His nails ripped through her shirt and left shallow gashes in her abdomen, and the holy water hit his chest, erupting in steam and screaming as he tore at the fabric.

“Stay out of my path, slayer,” he growled as he retreated, “or your watcher can tell you when I’m going to do.” The door slammed back open while he ran, leaving the shreds of his shirt behind.

Giles yelled after him, _“I’ll kill you myself before you lay a hand on her.”_


	5. Asylum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spike and Dru, increasingly desperate, seek asylum

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi!!! Look at this, a consistent update. Wow. This chapter is dedicated specifically to our friend Kristi, who got all of us this invested in Dru—your legacy carries on. (Insert happy whale sounds here!)

When the door slammed shut, Giles rushed to Buffy and after a cursory investigation of her wounds, he pulled her in for a hug, and then told her, “Buffy, we have to get you, and your mother out of Sunnydale. Take Willow and Xander.”

Buffy had never heard Giles so terrified, even when they faced the Master, the time she literally died. This didn’t seem right, even if the scratch stung. Willow shakily picked up the watcher’s journal, and opened it, flipping through it, trying to find the passage Giles was reading. “What’s going on here, Giles? You didn’t wig this hard about the master, or Spike and Dru. What’s weird about him?” Buffy asked, trying not to panic until at least she knew what the situation was. Giles could just be hopped up on Earl Grey. Or, god forbid, coffee.

Somehow, it didn’t seem like it.

Giles struggled for something to say, mouth flapping open and closed as though his lungs didn’t have the power to push words past his lips. He looked like he’d been kicked in the lungs. Fortunately, he didn’t have to worry too much about speaking. The door interrupted his attempts at speech, revealing the Sonnet Killer himself, more in disarray than they’d ever seen him. He strode in, standing off to the side by the exile table. His obnoxiously bleached blonde hair was coming out of its normal gelled back style, breaking into waves and curls, and his shirt was wrinkled as though it had been balled up into fists. He had someone in his arms, curled so tightly Buffy thought she was a child at first, and not someone real person-sized, even if she’d seen a flash of her.

She was in a white dress, and she looked disconcertingly young, her arms wrapped around spike’s waist, under his coat, knees tucked under the side. Her face was buried in Spike’s chest, not looking out at the rest of them. It struck Buffy how small she seemed. Whoever sired her must have found her young. Probably not even 20, younger than the rest of them in the room. She assumed that was Drusilla, because who else would voluntarily be that close to Spike? She was kind of underwhelming. She looked fragile. Buffy didn’t know what to make of her, except to think that that tiny little thing had caused all that destruction, created Angelus. Maybe she was just afraid of what she’d done coming back to haunt her? That had to be why Spike sprinted away with her when she told him the moon had turned from them or whatever.

Xander opened his mouth, and then thought better of pointing out that they didn’t even need Angelus’ help to find the latest vampires they needed to be killing.

“I want asylum,” Spike announced, his arms protectively curled around Drusilla. “Slayer, you’re in more danger than I could ever…” he lost his words for a moment when Dru shifted, swinging her legs down to stand on her own legs. She stayed flattened protectively against his chest, but craned her neck, like she was shoulder-checking, Her grey-blue eyes scanned the Air above Buffy, who wondered how this was the woman who’d made them impossible to find.

“Slayer,” he plead, “what’s just come into Sunnydale is going to leave a lot more damage in his wake that a couple neckbeards and the like in supply closets. You’re going to have a bloody mess on your hands, and I want him dead as much as you do.” Through his plea, his eyes followed Buffy’s every movement. He was smart enough to know nothing he could say would be enough to protect Dru, not without proof. He swore, after Prague, he’d protect her. That mob had to nearly bloody kill him to get to her, so nearly that Dru stopped being able to see him. It was the only time since she’d created him that she hadn’t thought anyone was coming for her. She told him of skies black as ink and red as blood, oozing down onto her without a star to be heard.

That was the first line of a poem he’d never been able to finish, an incomplete promise to keep her safe. It just dredged up too many feelings, even years later.

Buffy raised an eyebrow at him, before drawing herself up to her full 5’2, and crossing her arms. “I didn’t think you’d care about having friends in town, unless you’re jealous,” she baited him, drawing a stake from her jacket pocket, and taking a step closer. This kept her in between Spike and her friends.

Giles tried to say something, but the best he could think of was to dart to Willow and pick up the book. Spike snarled derisively, turning sideways to keep Drusilla further from Buffy.

“And you!” Buffy pointed at Dru, “if the monster you made lays a finger on my friends, or my mom, or my dad, there’s nowhere you can run that I won’t find you.”

Buffy didn’t know who spoke first, whether it was Giles saying her name, Willow, making a distressed sound behind her, or Spike snarling “the monster she made?” Drusilla said something too, something quiet, and probably intended only for Spike, as he moved her behind him now to face Buffy himself.

“You really thought I wouldn’t find out who made him?” Buffy demanded, circling around Spike, who moved with her, keeping Dru behind him. Dru was singing something dizzying under her breath, wrapping her arms around Spike’s waist. Buffy caught the occasional word, something about violent ends. She knew what she did.

“She didn’t make him do any of it,” his voice took on an edge, “she never wanted this!” His vampire face came out. Angelus sidestepped the blame for what he’d done to her incessantly. The slayer’s words cut him to the bone. All Dru had done to incur his wrath was devote herself to her god, and be born with visions. All she’d ever done was exist, and for that, he took everything.

“He told me everything,” Buffy insisted, not trusting Angelus, but trusting these two less. They were the evil she knew and was dealing with, and no one really knew what Drusilla was capable of. Most vampires were predictable, they needed blood, they liked the hunt. It was harder to pin down what she wanted, especially if she endangered herself enough to go into a church to get to him. “He told me about the nuns,” she pressed, getting a little closer to Spike, who snarled, and tensed, every muscle in his body ready to spring.

“Buffy!” Giles called, diverting her attention for a moment, while Drusilla seemed to crumple against Spike.

“They talk to her,” she lamented, the first Buffy heard her speak up, “all bits of glass with sharpened edges, can’t they know my hands are all torn?” she almost seemed to plead with Spike, “can’t catch the while flock of pretty birds—not even one,” she continued, something in her voice mournful. Buffy had no idea what any of those words meant—assuming they meant anything.

Spike turned his back to the slayer so he could face her, his face reverting to human. He took her hands, and smoothed his fingers across her palms, “no glass here, pet, it wasn’t ever meant for your hands,” he whispered. his voice was achingly sincere, his back exposed to the slayer so he couldface her. He took one of her hands and raised it slowly to his lips so he could kiss it, then take her into his arms and hold her again. She tipped her head into his chest, a couple tears staining his shirt while she confessed against his skin. He exchanged his promises into her hair.

Giles looked to Buffy, “I need to ask them some questions,” he explained, ignoring the critical look she shot him. She was just confused by why now he was ready to get chatty with the vampires.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this was short, but the next chapter is coming soon! Be warned, it has flashbacks to Dru’s backstory in it!!


	6. Poets and Martyrs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dru flashback chapter! Skip the sections between the stars if you need to avoid that (there's only a tiny bit of dialogue that happens in the present timeline). the first flashback is before the nuns get killed, and the second is after. there's all kinds of implied/referenced content, but all that goes on actually on screen is an accidental holy water burn, and considering staying in the holy water.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So,, I actually plan to write out this whole backstory, but I don't know what framing device I'm using yet, or how I'm going to write the worst bits (I have another pseud that my really fucked up stuff goes to--that might get a version without the skip I make in this depiction, but then I have to debate the point to showing it). Anyway, this is getting close to the end of the stuff I had prewritten, so uhhhh who knows when the next chapter is coming. Not me! but I'm having FUN. 
> 
> Also the watcher diary entry was an attempt at synthesizing an account from only what someone a) not there, and b) not familiar with the situation could get from evidence available to him ,and conjecture, and it was fun (even if Dru deserves better. You know I'm going to give her better)

Giles approached the pair of vampires, clearing his throat when Spike didn’t acknowledge him, still whispering to Drusilla in words that felt as though they had to be code, or some other language. It all seemed to be gibberish to Giles, but it seemed to placate Drusilla. She didn’t let go of him, clearly aware she was in a room of people that wanted her dead. Spike waited until she was still to look at the watcher, “what do _you_ want?” He asked, sounding exhausted.

When he showed him the page in the watcher’s diary about the London Church Massacre, and his features contorted in disgust. “Don’t-” he insisted, “what do you want from me, watcher?” he demanded, “heard the bloody story enough times from him. Bastard likes to brag,” he muttered. He wouldn’t look directly at Giles, and something in him seemed tense, held back. Was he trying not to cry or scream? Even he didn’t know. He’d done both before.

Drusilla turned around, plucking the book from Giles. She needed to know what they said—the stars fed lies in beams of light that had forgotten how to burn. Perhaps on these pages, they remembered how.

***

_London church massacres, February 14-15, 1860. Final death toll unknown, pieces of at least 60, likely more women recovered. One woman seen fleeing the scene the following night, identified as the vampire Drusilla, a former novitiate. A witness who succumbed to injuries told a doctor that she was of the devil, and she’d brought the devil upon them. It is suspected that she was either sired in the massacre, or an accomplice._

“Can I make an objection, or is that just for weddings?”

Every vision. Every night awakened screaming and sobbing, feeling sticky with blood or else her own sweat. Every time she’d scrubbed raw her own body because she’d _felt_ him. It was all at once real and before her. She’d seen it for years, this very church, the robes she wore, the priest clothed the same. She’d seen the way the nuns would be arranged in the pews, the song the choir would sing. All those times, and she still wasn’t ready.

She looked for comfort, protection to the saints that haunted the windows. The saviour in the ceiling. Their glassy eyes were hard. _The lord will use you and smite you down_.They would not save her. They wanted it. Wanted her to pay. To suffer. To hurt.She was a wicked thing—she’d brought the devil into the church. All she could do next was to try to become another glass saint, and shatter for them. Save the sisters, the father, as she hadn’t saved her own.

She understood what she was, and what she could do.

Their eyes were on her, glass and flesh, as she left the altar, and walked down the aisle. She couldn’t feel her legs. In the silence, she could hear her lungs grappling for rasping breaths—who knew what would be the last? Tears spilled down her cheeks. She had to do this. Had to take it, to save them. A wicked messiah, to deliver them of her own evils. “I…I understand,” she forced her voice to come out level, coherently enough. “I can’t be saved. You are the Accuser.” It was Milton’s preferred title for the devil. Fitting. “Take me to your Hell. It was always me…not them, not my family… I won’t run any longer,” she vowed. Not the vow she wanted tonight.

His laugh was caustic. It burned her ears, rung out through the silence in the church, even the priest frozen in place. “Oh, Drusilla, for someone who sees so much, you’re so slow to learn,” he chastised. His smirk was an evil act in and of itself. “You killed these people the moment they took you in. The devil’s always been on your heels, _lover_ , and no one here is free of the sin of harbouring you.” He held out his arms, a mockery of the way they did when they said the Lord’s Prayer. “There's no absolution for anyone here tonight, but I’m a merciful accuser,” he drew a knife with a razor-sharp blade, holding it out to Drusilla blade-first. Her eyes were wide—this wasn’t in the script. She’d never seen this before. Was he asking her to fall on the sword? “You want to _grant them your peace_ , then you’ll do the honours,” he spun the blade, offering it to her by the hilt, “you’ll kill them, like you did five years ago, because if I do it, I’m going to have my fun. It’s just been so long…” he trailed off, flashing a faint, cross shaped scar on the back of his hand. _Cecelia’s_. Didn’t save her—Drusilla was, by blood, hers.

It would have been a mercy, but she wasn’t sharp. She was meant to shatter that night, and she would. She couldn’t take his part. The hilt of the knife weighed on her palm, and tumbled to the ground. She crumpled with it.

He laughed, “well, that’s just disappointing,” he drawled, “Let it never be said you had virtues,” and picked the knife back up. As he pulled the nearest sister into his arms, and his face became that of a demon, he reminded her, “it’s on your hands either way.”

There was an audible crack. She didn’t have the heart to look. The eyes of the saints saw her, judged her, and damned her, before he’d laid a hand.

***

When her eyes went unfocused, Spike plucked the book out of her hands, lip curling in distaste. He barely skimmed it before shoving it at the watcher—he didn’t care about any account others than hers. He didn’t care what some watcher thought, or how Angelus described it frame-by-frame so she’d see it in his head—it had been so hard not to have the intrusive thoughts. The watchers thought it was her doing, just like the victorians had. Just like Angelus did. “It wasn’t you, love,” he denied them, “not the violent delights or the violent ends... not the broken glass... not the flock that touched the skies and became stars. You didn’t ask for it. All that glass wasn't meant for your hands.”

Small mercy the slayer and her cronies wouldn't understand what he was saying.

His voice broke, “should’ve been canonized...” he whispered, the words rasping. He had no more voice, “you were a martyr, and they never knew it, but I know.”Everything he said after came out in a barely audible whisper. The corners of his eyes prickled, but he forced it back with a breath his lungs no longer needed. He wasn’t going to cry, not in front of the slayer. If he showed emotion, or weakness, she was the one on the line. It was his first days as a vampire all over again, learning what he had to be to minimize the harm. Silencing what he felt for her.

He learned long ago not to speak of destiny.

***

_Despite the dissimilarity to traditional vampire attacks—both in the choice of location, and the quantity of blood left in the corpses, it is clear that it was perpetrated by one or more vampires. Due to the textbook appearance of puncture wounds over major arteries, and the presence of Angelus and Drusilla, it is theorized that Drusilla herself was sired off-site, one to two days earlier, and upon rising launched a retributive attack on the convent she’d been sent to after her family’s brutal murder five years prior. At that location, eight individuals were found in various stages of dismemberment. Anne theorizes that Drusilla—as she had a reputation in the community as a witch, was either attempting ritual sacrifice, or trying to draw the attention of Angelus. With this understanding it is clear why she retreated to the convent—she knew of his appetites._

_It is a grim thought, though Anne swears, by the bloody habit, that there has to be a reason she was spared at the convent, and that it is clear she was present. It makes far more sense for it to have been two vampires than one in any case. This seems likely._

She woke up, and the floor beneath her was sticky—her pooling blood long since dried beneath her. Around her, they were arranged, pieces, heads and hands, bodies strewn down aisles. Faces all staring, some eyeless, some gaping. All the heads were turned to face her, the saints in the windows too. She was bound for Hell—she deserved Hell. She was alive when once again all those who’d cared for her were strewn around her.

Standing up was an act of contrition. Her stiff muscles seemed to protest straightening. She nearly fell over, knees ready to buckle. Her habit hung off her body in shreds and ribbons, exposing red and violet stained flesh to the scrutiny of the saints. Her crimes couldn’t be wrapped up and snuffed in the fabric, even if she could cover herself. She knew what she was. She’d tried to pull it over her, but she could hear their voices in the silence, accusing. Nothing could absolve her of these people’s lives. Every name. Every birdie in the sky, merged into the cloth and become one more of the stars. The head of the priest, perched on the communion cup, blood or wine overflowing onto the altar. He stared at her with unseeing eyes. He saw.

She tripped over an arm, with its hand clenched. A silver bracelet with a cross dripped off her wrist. When her body hit the ground, her ribs, and chest, and thighs all ached, as though she’d been bludgeoned. She lay on the ground once more, three steps closer to the altar than she’d been. Father saw. His eyes, his glassy eyes damned her.

Her body ached beyond anything she’d ever felt. Was this not hell enough? What more could the devil do?

She screamed, all that hampered her voice the sobs that constricted her chest. She screamed until her already hoarse throat could take no more, and crawled across the floor in front of the altar, and forced herself up to her knees, and sobbed prayers until the words became meaningless sound. Father didn’t absolve her, but smelled sickly sweet, like rotting fruit, and it wrapped around her, almost choked her. She was drowning in it, but didn’t know what the smell could have been. She rose from her knees. She’d left a trail of blood. Her knees were red with it.

Her whole body was bloody, and she didn’t know what of it was hers.

She stood before the fountain of Holy Water, the only thing he hadn’t touched. There was no blood in the water. It was clean. She could be too. She could clean the devil off her body, and start over. She could give herself back to the Lord, and take the Hell she was given. Take the smite of the son’s thunder, as the devil and his lot before her. She whispered a prayer, this one a plea, its words lost to the years, and threw herself to the mercy of the water.

_“All the Hail Maries in the world aren’t going to help. The lord will use you and smite you down.”_

She screamed again, watching her skin peel in contact with the water, blistering and writhing, the flesh no longer wanted her. It tore her apart with clawed hands, trying to pull her under—she understood—she could baptize herself and be no more. In the smoke of her remains, she’d be delivered. It wafted around her.

It _hurt_. She threw herself out of the baptismal font, cowardly, clawing for life, tearing the stinging wet habit from her body and writhing away from it. She lay there on the ground, eyes stinging with tears, hands red and bloody, gasping in long breaths that bruised lungs didn’t seem to need the air. She lay, naked, strewn across the floor, looking up at the skylight of the church, the man on the cross seemed to have vacated his frame. There was nothing past the glass the smoke wafted to.

She was well and truly damned now. The Lord would not take her back.

Wearily, she rolled up to her knees once more, ignoring the blisters that ruptured when she moved and wept bitterly into the floor, the condemning eyes of the saviour himself, and all is angels and saints painting her naked body with the colours of the glass, “why have you forsaken me?” She repeated into the floor. How did she get this far? How did she become a monster? She repeated it until she could no longer taste the smoke off her body, see faces twisting in it, mocking her. Telling her to go where she belonged, to carry her crimes to the devil.

When she stood again, she took shaky steps on blistered feet and aching legs, wincing each time. She hobbled to the sanctuary at the back, where no one would see her, and curled up as tightly as the bruises would allow, and tried vainly to pray—not for salvation, but for deliverance.

Deliverance—death—was the best she could ask.

***

Her knees buckled—Spike could tell it was getting worse. She wasn’t often gone this long. He knew what she was seeing—he’d _heard_. He stayed out of his head only by whispering her the words of one of his sonnets—a familiar one, lost into her hair. And then he talked. “You’re here with me, love. It’s Spike. I’ve loved you for a century—and I’m not going anywhere,” he promised, “And he’s never going to touch you again. I’ll kill him this time, like I should have the first night. Violent ends have to end.”

Buffy, who’d been standing awkwardly between Spike and the table her friends were at, looked to Giles and lead him back to the table. Giles opened the passage they’d been on, seeing the drawing of Drusilla and Angelus Anne had made on the page adjacent to the entry. Willow gestured toward herself, taking the book from Giles.

“We’ve reached the end, love. It’s a better place here. I’ll _make_ it a better place here,” his voice broke a little more, the emotion showing through. It hurt more than he could describe to know that night in the church wasn’t ever over, that it lurked in the back of her head, and waited to sink its claws in.

Through the silent library echoed a desperate poet’s plea.

The rest of the room looked awkwardly between each other. Buffy hadn’t seen this before. She knew vampires could _hurt_ , obviously. Usually they winced when she kicked them in the face, and they sure weren’t wild on the staking. She didn’t think they were human enough to get hurt like that. The internal way that made everything around you into nightmares. The way earthquakes made her feel like she was going to die.

She also didn’t think they cared for each other. Obviously, they worked together, when it benefitted them. And the big bad always had minions, they weren’t a solitary species. It was just that Spike was acting like he loved her, or something, and love was a thing that people with souls did. Vampires were supposed to be monsters, and they weren’t supposed to love each other. Or anything, except murder, and blood, and probably that goth look like 90% of them were going for.

“is anyone else creeped out, because that,” he pointed at the vampires, “is not the natural order of things.” Buffy put her hand half-up, as though she thought putting it all the way up would somehow be too loud. Giles shot the both of them a _look._

Beside her, Willow was flipping further back into the watcher diaries, stopping on a page, covering her mouth, and muffling a _yikes._


	7. Glazed Gaze of the Accuser

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dru Says a prayer to Stained-Glass Giles--it comes out mostly in Paradise Lost

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I've witheld this chapter inordinately long because I didn't think I could do justice to this scene. I don't know if I have—relative to the version I imagined, but I'm also proud of what came out enough to put it loose into the world for you all.

Giles warily approached Spike again, thinking perhaps it would be best Buffy and her friends not watch this vampire have the vision the watcher diary incurred. “Do you, um,” he took his glasses off to clean, finding it far easier to address a formless blur of colour than Spike, especially Spike when he was behaving so humanely, “do you want to take her to my office? It’s less,” he paused to consider his next word, _“crowded_ than the library.”

Spike shook his head. “Can’t move her like this,” he said sadly, eyes downcast, “she won’t know where she is when she comes back, and that makes it worse.” Something in his blue eyes looked almost pleading when he finally looked at Giles, but there was nothing anyone could do. He was disconcerting, a vampire and a killer, now very lost and very desperate. It humanized him in a way that was foreign and confusing to those in the room whose lives revolved around staking their kind. 

The others couldn’t help but gawk, Willow at least having the dignity to do so from behind the book that had already shocked her, while Xander and Buffy did so unabashedly. This wasn’t something any of them had ever seen, and staring felt like the best—the only—way to understand what they were seeing. Two vampires, one desperate to save the other from something they couldn't see or fight, the other lost somewhere between the pages and the future. 

Spike would have chastised them, if he'd paid them any mind. The world was small for those moments, just he, Dru, and thee watcher, who ceased to exist once he'd stopped asking questions. He watched every word she mouthed, every little movement, waiting for her to return to him. He knew some of the words. Knew the prayer. It was just so _long_. She'd been away for _minutes,_ the longest ones he swore he'd feel in eternity. Slowly, as if giving into whatever she saw, she slackened in his arms, every muscle going from tight enough it could have snapped to limp. Someone had cut her strings. She was limp a long time, as though it took time to relearn how to move. Perhaps as though it was easier to play dead—the real kind of dead. Eternal bloody torment was what he'd called it, and he'd been right. Made Spike want to go hold his head in the baptismal font that had taught her that after all he abandoned her to, God didn't want her anymore. 

He'd have it out with God, or the Powers, or whoever he had to over that one. 

He read her lips, the words both painful and familiar. He'd never be prepared. She didn’t open her eyes, though she silenced, and then reached for him slowly, as if uncertain whether he'd burn, the same as the cross. “I _didn’t…”_ she insisted to him, or perhaps to the rest of the room, the book, all the Accusers that surrounded her. “I couldn’t hear, it was too _loud._ I wanted mercy, but all my promises were glass, and the edges weren't yet sharp—mercy was… he wanted it to run, and stain, and flow. He wanted the glass to be the sword, but nothing could be forged,” she plead with him, as though Spike could grant absolution, “not enough stars...hiding their fires, couldn't be forged.” She pressed her face into him, still not willing to look at him. He knew she knew who she was pleading with though, she'd know his hands, if nothing else. She knew only one set of hands that held up rather than down.

“It wasn’t you, love. You tried everything you could to save them,” Spike kept his voice low, though the sound carried through the silent library. He remembered the lengths she’d gone to—Angelus liked to boast, told him all about the things he'd made her do. The worst he'd learned from her—not the graphic details, but the things she thought, the guilt she carried, the way it felt, being the one left alive in the eye of a storm she felt she'd created. She asked Spike why it wasn’t enough, why only blood was mercy. Spike hadn’t had an answer. Angelus hadn’t wanted it to be a chance, just pretence enough that she could regret not killing them herself for _mercy_. She’d offered Angelus anything to spare them, and Angelus told him all about how he'd changed his plans. More violent. Slower. Couldn't let her be a martyr, even if she suffered worse than anyone else in the room, and then lived 20 years with it before Spike could offer any consolation.

Silence again smothered all inhabitants of the room. It travelled, noxious in the air and filled throats, choking, stifling silence, they drank in with each breath—living and dead alike. The silence suffused their limbs, like rigorous mortis. So the gentle patter of the rain on the windows assailed them, nearly as deafening as their own racing thoughts, and none of them moved, or spoke, or so much as looked to each other. For a moment, it was as though they all knew death, in the drawn out, violent silence of the library. 

Her feet hit the ground—a volley of cannon fire, striking with each step, wrenching herself from Spike's hands. She reverberated through the speech like an earthquake, surging and tearing across the floor, and the shelves until she reached the window. Disquieted, the others stared in some mix of awe, horror and shock. One final calamitous impact, and she dropped to her knees before the stained-glass watcher, the accuser of opened books, left to spill their words. _I can reshelve your books, but not your sins._ The aftershocks reverberated, as she took whimpering, tearstained breaths, as though she'd forgotten she didn't need to breathe, and was trying to summon words. It was the sound of someone alive and on the verge of lapsing into death, the rest of them still bound up in rigorous mortis.

Spike hadn’t noticed the bloody window. Stained glass watcher as the lord and saviour of the library, reshelving books but not sins. Fucking stained glass, in the window, and crosses on every surface. Could they have gone to a worse place? His stupor broke with the silence, mere moments before she could speak. He walked to her as though every step would tear apart the floor, and rend them further apart, his feet light on the wood. The silence was oppressive and fragile, and it _hurt_ to tear into it enough to be heard.

The only one immune to the silence, Dru's eyes were as glazed as the Patron-Watcher in the glass, but it was his that she felt had _seen._ He had come, after all this time, to pass judgement, and he knew who had turned all those voices to stars. He knew who filled the sky until it spilled red tears back onto her. Her sins poured off the pages, the final testament, the watcher's final condemnation. He could never rack her sins to the shelf, take them off her back, and return them like his book. She was stained with red starling, ink, and in them fault. Changed so deep the red ran through her. Ink that didn’t leave the page, writ into her skin in silver and pink. Ink that was marked all over her, sure as sunlight through the glass, all those colours, not a one hiding her from the light. The accuser returned, glazed gaze sharp as she remembered. 

_I can reshelve your books, but not your sins._

“Why _can’t_ you put them on the shelf? What do you see?” her plea, strident, sounded through the room, but did not reach the eyes, which bore down, relentless. The eyes did not acquit her. They'd never released her, even the ones she'd left in the ground. “Why is the ink permanent? Burn the pages, stain the paper, turn it to the shelf. Why can't you take it from me?” She touched the glass, green for a field at the feet of the watcher. “What do you see? Can't you see _why?"_

"Love?" Spike asked, his breathless voice nearly lost in the wake, finally taking his place behind her. He'd stand by her, like he wished he could have before.

He was lost to her. Her hands canvassed the glass, grazing the green glass that made the grass at the bottom, coming away sticky with the residue of the paint. She pressed them in, on either side of the cross and tipped her head forward, dangerously close to the foot of the cross. She could feel it, trying to burn her, so close she could taste shook in her lungs. “Hell from Heaven,” her voice started weakly, “What was it you wanted for us?” She asked. Her voice low, as though if she cried out again, the glass would shatter and rain down upon her. As though she was in a holy place that constricted voices into throats, right until they screamed. “Seek death, or supply it with bloody hands—I _tried_ —were we not all to have death in us?”

Those words came from Spike—or, at least they started in him. _Paradise Lost—_ he'd studied it in university. She used to pick her words out of his, so he could follow them: Romeo and Juliet, Wordsworth, verse and prose. She thought it would lead him in. Eve had said those words: seek death, or supply it, when she'd nearly martyred herself for mankind. She wasn't allowed to be the saviour only because she wasn't chosen—it didn't matter if she was willing to lose everything. Didn't matter what she would sacrifice. The script was written. She was accused, and punished, and subjected. No one remembered her as salvation—it wasn't what her dust was formed into.

_“Dust_ …Dust… and ashes, but the dust became the eternal? What’s left to take? The vile body? The sharp glass, or the hollowed eyes?" she again cast her eyes up and onto the Watcher, whose eyes were still hard. No lenience for the vile body, no eternity beyond the torment. Eternal here, and past it only glass. "I wanted to be pure,” she confessed, her head swaying back and forth, as if to deny what she became, what she'd wanted. “Wrong to deliver, wrong to subject, wrong to be cut to pieces, wrong to take apart the pieces," she closed her eyes and bowed her head once more, biting down on the inside of her lip. Mustn't cry. Tears don't wash it away. Not the way to absolution. "Prison ordained by the angels…darkness…fires unconsumed…was hope really never to come? _Was he?”_

Had it been the most damning of her sins to condemn another. Condemn a set of hands when hers were empty. A man whose words were so beautiful she wanted them to stain, wanted them to cover her. Wanted to hide in his eyes. Was it wrong because he'd love her? Because he'd want it? Because he was never to fall until she took him into her hands.

Spike took the chance of putting his hands on her shoulders, and whispering in a tone to match hers, “I will always come to you, love. I won’t leave you for the fires.” He assumed he was who she spoke of. Nothing could make him regret what he'd become, the man or the monster. The blood, the love, or the centuries. Nothing Angel, or any of the hells could do that would make him regret her. She was lost in time, and he caught her, in a rare present nestled in swathes of entwined pasts and futures. She found him, and every bit as much, every night, he found her. 

Drusilla whimpered, these hands that tried to deliver her, but the eyes—the eyes did not absolve. They held her pinned, like wings to the glass. If she was to die here, pinned through the chest to the glass, she needed the eyes to close, or else to look with some mercy. The judgement was absolute. It rained behind him, he bled, or sweat, or wept, but he did not relent. “Am I for the doleful shade, where peace and rest can never come?” she asked, her voice nearly dying in her throat, barely embers, “Torture without end still urges, defaced, deflowered and now to death devote.” The words were out of and not from her poet, the devil and man, alike when they were damned, alike in she who dared drink of the devil: “eternal torment, am I learning?” She hissed at the saint, seeking any answer. Why this hell? Was it Death doing part? Was it losing home? Was it devils in the church?

If she knew why, perhaps she could repent. 

Spike looked helplessly to the watcher, the slayer, and her friends. He made eye contact with Giles, who cleared his throat, kept his voice low, and said, “Buffy, Xander, perhaps it’s time Willow and I catch you up,” before escorting them from the table, even if Buffy took a second to get up, staring at Drusilla as though she’d never seen anything like this—and as much as Spike wanted to growl at her for seeing his wife so vulnerable, the slayer _hadn’t_ seen anything like this. She’d never seen a vampire face anything worse than death. Willow also hesitated in the doorway, looking like she wanted to say something.

She was the one of them who’d read the entry. _Smart girl_. Must have just pieced together the horrors the pages turned around the blames for. Selfishly, that pleased Spike. One person alive who _had_ to consider that she wasn’t just a monster, like watcher-dearest taught them. One person who didn't blame her. One person who saw what he was. 

The door shut. He breathed a wholly unnecessary sigh, to try to feel the relief. At least now there was no voyeur's eyes, consumingg her suffering like some kind of show. A vampire who can feel, can grieve, can regret, can pray… She wasn't their spectacle. Sodding glazed eyes, casting judgement. She _carried one_. She never lost the guilt, even if they’d buried the last of the eyes. He wanted to shatter the window, all the windows. Wanted to pound on Angelus until there was nothing left of him but dust. Wanted to fight something, anything, until this went away. Wanted to kill her demons once and for all, as though he could. As though, violence and gentleness and anything between he could muster was enough. He was as lost as he'd always been. He'd promised her a long time ago, he'd keep finding her. His place was still here, however lost he felt. She'd always find home. 

“I confess,” her voice broke, and she carried on in a whisper, “to almighty God, and to the Angel and saints,” she paused there, trying to draw strength through her sticky, extended hands. Always sticky. It didn't wash away. “That I have sinned, in swathes of red, and broken glass, damning secrets in sanctuaries turned to Hells…in letting the demon in-” one hand clasped to a fist over her heart, “inside… being created… _wrong_ ,” she stopped again, for a heaving breath, half choked with a sob. Once again, she forgot she didn't need the breath. She was so alive—this kind of hurt could only be alive. “Through my own fault… _mea culpa…mea culpa…mea maxima culpa.”_

She continued to repeat the latin, her hands reaching out for the base of the cross, smoke billowing around them as she plead with the figure before her. The patron saint of the sins on the shelf, and the accuser. Spike didn’t remember much of his church latin—not enough to reassure her, not enough to tell her it was over. He didn't have the words in her tongue, but he had the words she'd drawn out of him.

Hopefully, she'd drawn them out of him that he would understand. She'd searched for him in angels and serpents and apples. He could find her in those words. “In thee, something more sublime and excellent than what they’ve condemned,” he whispered, wracking his brain for more of the ending. "Let us no more contend or blame.” The words that could help in this moment slipped through his mind. Poetry was always his language and he was tongue-tied—astonished—turned to stone. Milton had no words that would help him, no words to tell her there was no fault. 

“Please, love,” he begged, no elegant words, nor borrowed poetics, but the glint in his eye of unshed tears, “it’s over now…no more fire…no more glass…those aren’t your sins. The stars have forgiven, and hope-” his voice caught a moment, "hope was always to come."

She recognized gentleness in the voice behind her, and leaned back, head coming to rest against Spike’s leg, her hands leaving the burning glass, and crossing over her chest. She was silent, done admitting fault. She opened her eyes, looking up at him a moment, her hazy blue-grey eyes finally meeting his, _seeing_ him. She looked into him as though drinking him in, returning to the present where he was. One burned hand reached up, pressing against his arm, then sliding down to take his hand. Their fingers interlaced and she looked at their hands as though they would once again carry her out of Hell.

“Promise I was your destiny?” She asked, falling sideways, her eyes closed before she could hear his soft, fervent reply.

_“I Promise.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah. It came out a way I'm proud of, even if this was the fifth or sixth draft of this bit.
> 
> The incorporation of Paradise Lost happened only cause I got tired of trying to mine juicy bits out of victorian mass scripts and prayers. I was studying it, and so many parts of it worked for this piece. the first reference "seek death or supply it" is from book 10. "Prison ordained..." is book 1--describing Hell. "the doleful shade" is also book 1, and then "Defaced, deflowered and now to death devote" is book 10. The reason I flip between them (even though 10 is like, never read) is that 1 is when Satan is damned to hell, and 10 is when mankind get damned. 
> 
> Spike's but "In thee, something more sublime" is book 10, when Adam reassures Eve. 
> 
> Next chapter, I swear, there will be levity, and also more characters introduced.


	8. Close My Eyes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so, wheeeee here we are. I've done way too much writing. most of this happened today while I was supposedly in class--and I was, at least, according to my webcam. 
> 
> Couple thing about this chapter: the first is that, just so many great poets are named William. like so many, and that I'm not quite sure how to write Jenny. I know the buffy writers had a lot of really stereotypical writing around her family, and that they kind of heavily code the Kalderash people as Romani. And I will admit, I honestly haven't done much research, because I hadn't initially planned on her being as important as I feel like she's going to be here, but I will be doing more reading into how to depict her for this fic, because her knowledge of Angelus is going to be really key. If anyone has research directions to point me in, I'm all ears! Otherwise I'm going to see how Roma people depict themselves and what in the writing I'd want to look at, change or retake.

Willow shut the door behind them, finally releasing them from the silence. Giles took his seat behind his desk, while Xander shifted his weight back and forth, in front of the weapon cabinet, and Buffy paced the other side of the room, while Willow waited in front of the door, hands clasped behind her back. No one spoke for a moment before Giles took a sip of lukewarm earl grey, and said, “right,” cleared his throat and started, “Willow and I have done some reading into the vampire Buffy encountered tonight.”

“Angelus,” Willow helped, “that’s his name… and it seems like he’s flipped the story,” she bit her lip, and looked back at Giles, like she was waiting to see if he’d say it. Something was wrong, and she didn’t want to be the one to have to put it into words.

“Flipped…” Buffy tried.

“Everything he listed did happen, in 1860,” Giles said, opening the diary back up, and gesturing to a page that had a diagram of a three storey house, with the positioning of bodies sketched—a slaughter. There were people in fractions, across multiple rooms. The names penned above each body, with ages really did it—drove it home that these were people, and then they weren’t. Then flipped forward past the diagram of which was laden in red, with one black outline—he flipped past it too fast for Buffy to catch any names, arriving at a portrait. “The issue is, he has a documented history leading back to the 1700's, and she…is purported to have been human up to here—” he tapped the portrait, where Drusilla’s eyes stared back at them. The drawing caught the glassy look perfectly. She didn’t seem to be present in the drawing—a mannequin beside Angelus. The sketch was made a couple of days after the church massacre, as captioned by the watcher.

Giles didn’t tell them the watcher’s council’s theory, about her being a witch, or about her being sired earlier. “Everything he’s told us was true…” he trailed off, hoping the others got what he was suggesting. He thought the watchers had gotten it wrong, based on Angelus’ stolen tale, and Spike's reaction to a glimpse at the pages, to say nothing of the way Drusilla had been talking to the window. If she was still trying to reconcile what had happened, she couldn't have been a participant in the slaughter. 

“Just, with the wrong names,” Buffy jumped in. She knew more than the others did, if that was true, like that there was one dead family member first, or that he’d followed her around, making sure she thought she’d caused it. Or that he’d said he threw himself into the ocean, so the death stopped at him. Drusilla’s thing about the window, and some of the stuff she said to Spike made Buffy’s skin feel too tight, and the library feel small and cavernous. _Tried to make the death stop at her._ Spike told her she’d done everything she could to save them. She, when she’d been talking to the window kept asking it why. She kept telling it she was in Hell.

It was bad. Whatever had made him do it, the picture came pretty clearly—Angelus had followed her, killing anyone who tried to get between them, so he could sire her. She didn’t have the why, but it seemed she wasn’t the only one. The little details he’d taken made it so much worse.

“Buff?” Xander asked, eyes narrowing in concern, “what is it?”

Buffy didn’t want to talk about the connections she made—none of them were really going to help them go slay, and none of them felt like things she was supposed to know, “nothing, just thinking about some stuff he told me,” she admitted, “so why the calls for me to go on vacation, Giles?” She asked, going back to what he’d been on about at least 3 crises ago, before there were vampires in the library.

Giles took a deep breath, “Angelus… one of the other watchers did a thesis at the same time as mine, and she focused on his patterns. I didn’t read her thesis, but,” the glasses came off, and he cleaned them again. That didn’t bode well, “this is part of a rather characteristic pattern for him. He seems to select a victim,” He sifted through his email, running a quick search and then clicking into some scans from a later diary he’d sent her for her thesis. “Here. 1898. He does the same thing, picks a victim, and starts with everyone around them.”

Buffy looked at Willow, whose mouth was set in an uncomfortable line, to Giles, who was pinching the bridge of his nose like he was getting a headache, to Xander, who still couldn’t stand still. “So the way I’m hearing it, we need me in town more than ever. He’s not after me yet.” She sounded so resolute. All that gave her away were her eyes, which couldn’t stay on any one of them, and looked between them. She couldn’t lose them.

Willow nodded, taking a couple steps forward to grab the chair Buffy was standing near, and Buffy put a hand on her shoulder. “Nothing is going to happen to you, Will. I promise.”

Giles looked around the room, and added, “I think-” and then lowered his breath, making them all come closer, “Buffy, you _aren’t_ his typical victim,” he shook his head, “I think he was looking for Spike and Drusilla, and now…”

“Now I've gone and made this all challenge-y because I didn't kill him in the cemetery.”

“Exactly,” he looked around at the three of them, “I’ve sent for Kendra, but that’s a long flight. She won’t be in until tomorrow afternoon, evening maybe. I don’t want you trying to handle this on your own, and I don’t want any of you alone after dark.” He looked down at his screen, waiting for the other watcher to message back indicating she was on her way. The flight took off in a couple hours. He wasn't going to see anything yet, but it wouldn't stop him from refreshing.

Buffy nodded, “alright. So we’re crashing here for the-” she started, already determining what she was going to tell her mother when she wasn't coming home, yet again.

“ _Buffy?”_ a voice called from the previously silent library, _“Giles,_ I need you to get your slayer, there’s a vampire in the parkade and _I want to go home tonight_.”

When Willow opened the door, Buffy was first to exit, seeing one pissed off Cordelia Chase standing by the naughty food table at the entrance, arms crossed. Spike and Dru had relocated away from the window to in front of the lower shelf by the table, the window was covered by curtains that Spike had stapled to the wall to hold it shut. She was tucked into his coat, and he was reading something to her, his voice finding an easy cadence.

Cordelia froze once she noticed them—the hot TA who was constantly telling people he was married, with what she presumed was his wife. Damn. She'd figured he was either gay, and using the wife as some kind of cover, which, who in the English department hides that they're gay? Or it was a _conflict of interest_ for him to het her section of intro to poetry know he was single. “Oh! William,” she blurted, “you’re probably wondering what that meant…” she trailed off. “We have a word for like, a big, big rat, cause they’re bloodthirsty, and we needed someone to get rid of them…” She shot Buffy a look, as the others came into the room. Buffy ignored it.

Spike shrugged, “oh, I thought you meant a _vampire_ in the parkade, snacking on people after night classes,” he said, not bothering to look up from his book, "slayer's got a little too much going on tonight to care about rats."

Giles cleared his throat, “Cordelia, I’d like you to meet _William the Bloody,”_ he started, “though more recently, he seems to go by Spike, or the _Sonnet Killer.”_

Cordelia responded a little absently, still processing that the wife was real, and she _had_ to tell Harmony that she'd actually seen her, “oh,” she said, before her brain caught up, “wait, my English TA is the guy leaving weird guys in janitor closets?” She blurted, gaining a nod from Buffy as confirmation. “So, why aren’t you slaying him?” She asked, staring at Buffy like she was missing an obvious part of the job.

“The vamp in the parkade is worse," Buffy took over, "apparently he's playing a fun new game of hunting my friends, until he decides to come after me. These two are helping us deal with him,” she kept the facts to a minimum. It wasn't right, she thought, telling Cordy much more about why they were against him. It would be like if Willow decided it was time to tell the wacky story of what happened to Buffy's first watcher, back in LA, or about her trip to some kind of psych lockup where all the meds felt weird, and had all these side effects, and someone was trying to persuade her that the vampires were some kind of delusion. Or if Xander decided retelling the _Buffy got drowned by a vampire_ story was something he got to do to just anyone. Some stories belonged to the people in them.

It didn't escape her that less than an hour ago, she was all in favour of staking both of them, and now telling stories felt too far.

“Well, it’s a good thing I’m not your friend,” Cordelia shrugged, “any chance he’ll just let me by?”

Drusilla looked up at her from her place on the floor with Spike, tilting her head ever so slightly. Cordelia shifted uncomfortably, under her half-unfocused stare. “The sky isn't supposed to rise red anymore. I didn't call for rain,” She told her, her tone soft, like she was trying to plead, when she turned back to face Spike, she asked, "promise you'll close my eyes if it rains?" and took his hand in both of hers, palms red and even a little blistered.

When Cordelia didn’t immediately back down, Spike re-worded what she'd said, “my wife sees the future, and she doesn't want to see you strewn all over the parkade,” he said, his voice taking on a harsh edge. For all the care they'd seen him exhibit, he had limits. These people weren't his, and he didn't stand for them. Protecting them was thoroughly the slayer's problem. He finally seemed like a vampire—a killer to Cordelia, who just sat down at the ‘sin bin’ table, muttering an _oh_.

It wasn’t her first near-death experience—her occasional involvement with Buffy and her ragtag team of misfits meant she’d had vampires try to eat her a couple times, and an invisible girl, and just, too many weird things that didn’t belong on campus, and weren't her problem until she met Xander Harris in her final year of High School. It was different. Death meant something, even when Giles was talking about you know, some vampire insurrection that was going to kill thousands. There was a casualness to Spike's words that felt wrong. Her dying in the parkade would upset his wife, and that was why he cared enough to stop her. In their world, she was like a juicebox on legs—she'd never had to feel how insignificant human life was there, and this was with the vampires who were supposed to be on their side.

She responded like she always did—pretended she was bigger and badder than whatever was going on. Pretending that nothing hit her. “Fine then, if Buffy can’t do her job tonight, and I’m stuck sleeping here, then I’m taking the office. The last thing I need is freakazoids like you guys staring at me while I’m unconscious.”

Xander, never one to let Cordelia get away with the ways she talked about the rest fo them, quipped back, “right, cause with a vampire on the loose, we’re all going to drop everything to watch you sleep,” he rolled his eyes.

Cordy glared back, “yeah, I'm sure you have lots of important snoozing at the table to be doing about that. Not to mention those doughnut runs. How _would_ Buffy survive without you?”

Xander glared back, “at least one of us actually sticks around when the demons get demoning.”

The two continued to argue, Willow conspicuously silent on the matter, even though she usually jumped in to play referee. Cordy was Xander’s high school ex, from an ill-fated relationship that made it all of… _was it a month?_ The two of them sure hadn’t lost their ability to fight. It was just so normal, on such a messy, terrible night, hearing them bicker. Comforting, somehow. Their argument faded into the background, a comforting ambient noise, as she returned to the table with Buffy, and Giles disappeared into his office, all returning to research—being if they could catch what his next move would be.

Spike returned to his poetry— _lyrical ballads_ , poems older than either than them, that as ballads had such a beautiful, flowing meter, and simple words that still formed something meaningful. It was ideal for this night. Not too hard, not too dark, except the Lucy poems, that focused on a girl who was unknown, and never again to exist, not written in layers of allusions. Something they could escape into. Wordsworth came through for them.

***

Two floors down, a girl—Lucy, was her name—was finishing up a reading, her book horribly defaced, margins scrawled in, corner’s dog-eared. The same book as Spike had been reading, _Lyrical Ballads._

“She liv’d unknown and few could know/when Lucy ceased to be” she scrawled beside the last stanza something in spiky cursive about absent women in Wordsworth, and magnitude of grief compared to Donne, "Fit for verse". Her writings appeared sporadic, and didn't make a lot of sense—she worked on a weird system of referring between texts that would send anyone looking at her copies into an endless loop of cross-referencing. But it helped for research, when she talked about the intimacy of grief—he didn't pretend they were timeless and star crossed. He was just a guy, writing about a girl who haunted the edges of his poetry. Next would come an unending cascade of research papers that she’d have to break down into useful points, which she was already _dreading._ But it was almost too dark out for her to like walking home, and honestly, Sunnydale was the weirdest place she’d ever lived, so she wasn't sure how much she liked walking back to her dorm anyway.

She stowed her book in her bag, and then tossed the bag over one shoulder. It wasn't like she could call anyone—she didn't know anyone at UC Sunnydale. It was the spring semester, and she was starting early, taking a couple classes before fall started. She'd briefly had a roommate, but she left one day, and never came back for her stuff. She hadn't really gotten to know anyone in her classes, spring courses went by rapidly, and she hadn't had time, between the papers. It was just weird, spending all night researching a series of poems about a girl with her name, who died young, and in relative obscurity. She considered making campus security walk her home, but what was she going to tell whoever picked up, that William Wordsworth creeped her out, and now she needed an escort to residence? She'd made them investigate a very loud raccoon once, and she still hadn't lived that down. Or whatever banging she'd heard in the music building that time, that they were 100% certain was a boiler, after they searched the entire damn building and found nothing. 

She was an adult— _kind of,_ and she could walk herself home, even if it was dark out. She wasn’t a writer, so it wasn’t like the sonnet killer was going to come for her, and it seemed to have made campus into a ghost town, after dark. People didn’t want to take the chance, unless their dorms were notorious for parties, and you couldn't think straight, let alone study in them. 

Spo she left the library, headphones in—they made the night feel less silent, less like something was going to spring out. The fastest way back to residence was through the courtyard, which, as a plus, no one else would be in, it was pitch black. She just didn't want to be out later than she had to, or longer than she had to, so she chanced the direct route, trying to step quietly in the squishy, rain-logged grass, phone flashlight revealing nothing more threatening than abandoned Starbucks cups. After awhile, it got easier. It wasn't quiet, with her music, and nothing had leapt out. Her eyes had adjusted enough that she could see further past the flashlight beam. She started to hum along with the song she was playing on repeat, looking up at the sky, where a few stars were scattered. 

_You’ve got celebration in your heart_

_You’ve got salvation, you’ve got scars_

_And everything that breaks you will not make you who you are_

It wasn't like anyone was going to hear. What happened tonight was between her and the stars, and there was a kind of freedom in the silence, no longer tense. She started to sing, dance a bit in the grass as she walked, the occasional twirl. She'd forgotten how to fear, between the pale, intermittent light, and the up-beat tone of the song, even if there was a darkness beneath the surface of the lyrics. It just felt different, somehow. There was a kind of power to it. And there was power in dancing through a field, belting out lyrics about recovering to the stars after reading poetry about her end, her finiteness and obscurity. Her eyes closed while she sang in a moment that felt outside the rest of her life, the relief poured down. It was true, she was making the sun come out at night, She felt it from the stars when she closed her eyes. There was immortality in it.

Not the same immortality as the man leaving the parkade held. He had wondered who he was going for tonight, if he was going to plan it out so Drusilla saw it, and see if she tried to be a martyr, or if he was going to leave the slayer a little present. He'd have _loved_ to see what she'd have done if the watcher hadn't ruined his fun, and she kept buying that he was some kind of tormented soul, trying to seek the woman who made him a monster. He didn't like—the little nun made him something. She made him a whole new class of vampire—she'd called him the devil, and he'd earned the name. After all, the devil, if he was up on his theology, started off as an Angel.

_You can make the sun come out at night, you can make everything alright!_

He squinted across the courtyard, seeing an erratically moving flashlight beam, that briefly illuminated a girl's face. Delicate little thing. Light blonde hair that fell in long waves. Wearing an oversized shirt and leggings. Her wrists looked tiny, and her couldn't see her arms. Looked on the verge of tipping over from her backpack, with every exaggerated slide and shift, and bob. Tiny, and not strong. Not fast weighed down by that thing. And she wasn't looking—not that she would see him from that distance. 

He was staring at an artefact—history in the making. Something just ephemeral enough, but just permanent enough to leave a stain. Human life was _beautiful_. 

Her emphatic voice sounded out across the field, singing one line that would change her future: _“So beautiful, so beautiful, just let it haunt you.”_

And things of beauty—hauntings came naturally. He'd give her credit for that, he was an _artist_ , after all, and he'd thought about this all wrong. He didn't want animal violence, he wanted his masterpiece back. And if he couldn't go pluck her out of the library he'd settle on _ekphrasis—_ art from other art. Hoped she'd recognize his artistic interpretation.

***

Cordelia had settled in, napping on the opposite end of the library from Xander, who’d joined Buffy and Willow at the research table. Willow had quickly switched focus from researching Angelus’ past actions—it felt really iffy, researching that when Spike and Drusilla were right there. Dru in particular, as probably the pinnacle of his violence, researching it wasn't like researching some historical person for a project. It was a real person's real experience, and one they could talk to. Willow figured if it was important, they could ask. So she got looking through murders in Sunnydale, seeing if anything matched his pattern, to see if he’d been here long—all she'd yielded was a couple suspicious cases in LA. Xander was looking up who had parking passes, and working with security camera footage Willow had hacked into with Buffy, to try to get ahold of students who were still there, to let them know there was a wild animal in there, and the parkade wasn’t safe.

There was no word from the office—they assumed he was trying to get ahold of his colleague, or the Watcher’s Council. _Something._ They were all doing something, to feel like they weren’t doing nothing, however small their actual contributions. The fact was, the only person who could predict who was in danger, or could tell them what he’d do next was a vampire, and no one was quite sure what she’d tell them, or really if she would.

Buffy, with what she knew, and her theory that she’d tried to sacrifice herself at the end, couldn’t reconcile the knowledge that vampires without souls could care about stuff from before they got turned. But somehow, she expected if someone was going to die, Dru was going to know about it, and she was probably going to try to stop it, or at least tell Spike, and her visions were pretty noticeable. And Spike, who didn't want her to have to see it again would intervene, she figured, for her sake. He seemed big on danger if it helped her, Buffy noticed. He put himself between her with a stake and his wife. Which, she didn't feel great about. It was somehow all different now. That wasn't trying to stake a slayer, that was serving Angelus' vendetta, telling her she'd turned him into that...

So Buffy trusted their judgement, and really, really didn't want to use her own yet. These were vampires, but this wasn't her world. 

If they’d talked about it, Willow would have agreed, but her research into vision blindspots, incomplete though it was, suggested that, she might not see everything—maybe it was spontaneous, or it was somehow outside the field of what she saw—which Willow didn’t know, but suspected was somehow linked to her—close to her, like geographically, or emotionally. They were good at avoiding Buffy, but was she going to see strangers, or see abrupt choices, or stuff that happened out of town? And, if there was history here, and he’d done all that, Willow expected Angelus would know her blindspots. 

If they’d talked about it, Xander would have told them that it was too bizarre, thinking about vampires being altruistic. He didn’t know what Willow did from the Watcher diary, or what Buffy did from Angelus’ plagiarized sob story. He didn't have Giles' research. What he knew was that there were a lot of dead victorians, and that two of them were here. He also knew the worst one was out there watching Buffy, which he wasn't a fan of, especially seeing how wacky the last person Angelus played with was. As far as he was concerned, it made sense that the vampires in the room were working with them probably just to avoid something worse, if there was bad blood between them and Angelus. Spike was still a serial killer, after all. Was his girl really going to look for what Angelus was doing to Sunnydale students?

Spike sure sounded convincing when he’d snapped at Cordy, so Xander supposed this was a wait-and-see scenario. Especially because, maybe they'd be motivated to back up Buffy, as the main thing keeping them away from him. And if they were willing to help Buffy, they could stay, for now. 

Though each of them was thinking the same thing, It was quiet in the room other than Buffy squinting at plates, and reading out numbers to Xander who cross-referenced with the licence plate database for parking pass owners, and Spike reading lyrical ballads, until Jenny entered. She opened the door to an almost-silent room, seeing the research happening, and wondering why Buffy was here and not going after the vampire on campus, because she thought Giles would have heard something from the wild animal email that was going out. In Sunnydale, the odds of a mauling being a real bear were astronomically low, so she just assumed demon or vampire. That was…bizarre. “Buffy?” She asked, “is Rupert here?”

Buffy nodded, gesturing to his closed door without looking away from the plate she was viewing, “office,” she said, off-hand, “Was there anyone in the computer lab when you left it?”

Jenny shook her head, “no, it’s getting late. The last couple people cleared out before I left.” She wondered if there was something bigger going on on campus, if Buffy seemed to be looking for a headcount. Before she could ask she spotted the new TA from English, who she’d met a couple of times, with someone she assumed was the wife he’d mentioned, reading something. She couldn't ask Buffy about demons in front of civilians, which explained the silence in the room. “lesson planning?” She asked him, wondering why they weren't in the English literature library.

Spike looked up, wondering how a professor of computer science got involved in any of this, or if she was just involved with Giles. She seemed as out of place to him as he did to her. He shrugged, not knowing how much anyone had told her nor wanting another person involved. They kept this small, there'd be less bodies when the slayer made mistakes. Dru answered her, “I like the words of all the Williams.” Which made him smile, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Blake, Yeats, and him. His name up there with all the greats. She held him in that light. And he tried to hold her to the level of craft, the level of exaltation she'd have gotten from one of the greats. She'd be immortal in verse, but more than that, she'd just be immortal.

Buffy, not looking up from the zoomed in licence plate on her screen—nearly decoded now—said, “that’s Spike, who we’ve been looking for.”

_Spike,_ in the library with them. _Buffy,_ not caring about his presence. The woman in his lap, who he labelled his wife looked familiar from an old family tale—she fit the bill, the way she seemed close to Spike, who was also an affiliate of Angelus. She looked small, unthreatening. Her gaze was focused, but just slightly above Jenny’s head. It would be easy to discount her as not there. Jenny didn't make that mistake. She was looking clearly, just at the air.

Her uncle had told her part of the family story they didn’t like to tell, about the night they cursed Angelus. Two days earlier, a woman had shown up, and spoken in some esoteric reference, with a meaning that eventually emerged explicitly clear. In two days, their most treasured daughter would fall to a great evil, a greater evil still if she rose. That everything that could be thought could be done unto one, again and again, and falling was mercy. A number of those who loved her would fall like petals, but they were only petals to strew the bed. She painted a horrific image in beautiful words, a warning that ought to have changed fate. And maybe fate wasn't to change, or maybe it was the knowledge of what she was that did it. The Omen burned when she touched the light. Smoke curled off her fingers, and her last pleas weren't heard. Jenny's uncle insisted, they knew what vampires were. They'd never known if the vampire's words were mockery, that they'd never stop it, or a warning. But she manifested like a ghost, and, when they closed their eyes to what she'd shown, disappeared like one. 

Her uncle always wondered why it wasn't her that got the soul, if she was the second half of some infernal dyad—a ghost of an Omen, and then the force she played harbinger of. She'd wondered that when she read the watcher's diaries account of the London church massacre. This didn't line up, somehow. Spike being here was wrong. He was another force—he killed slayers. She was supposed to appear alone if she was a mockery. Spike laying down his fight, with his preferred enemy right there. 

She wondered if that meant she got it wrong. 

Dru pointed to her, this time at her chest, her eyes leaving the air “shhhh… don’t skip ahead now,” she told her, “there isn't any smoke for you.”

Jenny nodded stiffly, opening the door to Giles’ desk, where she heard a voice emanating from his computer, “Rupert, you can’t call a state of emergency over one vampire after your slayer, and it isn’t my fault you’ve violated the ethics guidelines and let her bring civilians into it. I’m _sorry_. You know how it goes with slayers, after all,” he said, before disconnecting, with a little blip that left Giles shaking the screen, and uttering an impressive string of curses. His hands were shaky—probably not from too much Earl Grey. Maybe the Omen wasn't far from the harbinger—like the parkade and the library. And if that was true, he was after Buffy. 

But she wouldn't get ahold of herself. Giles would tell her what he was seeing. She couldn't start turning everything into Omens. “Careful,” Jenny quipped at his little outburst, “the students _are_ just next door.” 

His eyes lit up like he’d never seen her before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So Ekphrasis/let it haunt you in the Lucy chapter came to me in revision, but I love that turn, and I love how fucked up that is. also Ekphrasis on a meta-level if I decided to go further into Wordsworth and write her as an embodiment of the poem, which I don't think I'll do unless I do a standalone about her. the song from that scene is called Let it Haunt You (So Beautiful) by Sixx AM. Her walk home is based on something I also did in first year, living on residence. 
> 
> Also, the really fun thing I'm doing is keeping notes on who knows what, and what their current takes are--for spike and dru, I'm doing interpretation of team slayer, and for everyone else, I'm looking at what they're thinking about Spike and Dru, and I love how incomplete the information is--in an older draft, I actually planned to give them the full explanation. Now everything is scattered, and it's both more realistic, and setting up for a lot.


End file.
